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University of Maryland DOTS Selects StorTrends to Support its High-Demand Virtual Environment StorTrends High Performance Storage Serves as the Core of the University?s Transportation Services Virtualized Infrastructure NORCROSS, GA, November 04, 2014 /PressReleasePing/ – StorTrends® today announced that the University of Maryland’s Department of Transportation Services (DOTS) has selected StorTrends high-performance storage arrays to be the core of its newly implemented virtual infrastructure. With StorTrends, the university’s DOTS organization is able to achieve ultra-high storage performance, true storage tiering, data deduplication and archiving, with a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) at a very reasonable price.
Serving over 37,000 students and 13,000 staff (not to mention hundreds of daily visitors), the University of Maryland’s DOTS in College Park, MD is responsible for the day-to-day management of every single campus parking spot and the university’s fleet of more than 60 Shuttle-UM transit service vehicles. To support these valued student services, DOTS uses a number of innovative technology solutions to help streamline key processes, such as the management of university parking permits. The University of Maryland DOTS was among the first campuses in the country to implement a virtual permit system, which uses the vehicle’s license plate as its permit. To support this process, it uses license plate recognition cameras which are mounted to enforcement trucks to scan license plates to ensure they are properly parked in the correct lots. After analyzing the data in real-time, the system can alert operators when it fails to find a license plate match so that a citation can be issued.
The elegant parking enforcement system requires a healthy amount of storage capacity and performance to remain at optimal productivity. To support the environment, the University of Maryland DOTS has recently virtualized 90% of its infrastructure using VMware. Today, the environment is comprised of 17 VMware ESX virtual servers, two physical HP servers and several Microsoft SQL databases to support DOTS-specific shared drives and directories, the DOTS website and a host of other applications and systems, including its parking permit operations.
Until recently, the organization used a more expensive SAN solution that lacked a GUI that